The photos that were the first inside look since the disaster found none of the reactor's melted fuel or its cooling water but confirmed stable temperatures and showed no major damage or ruptures caused by the earthquake last March, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Tokyo, Jan. 19 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s crucial system to send nuclear plant status data was left without any emergency power source when the firm's doomed plant was hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami last year, TEPCO officials said Thursday.

The power firm removed the emergency power supply device for the system at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant in November 2010 during renewal work for the system, the officials said.

The system, which sends data on the plant's nuclear reactors to the government's Emergency Response Support System, had no emergency power source when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami struck, the officials said.

Fukushima, Jan. 19 (Jiji Press)--High levels of radiation have been detected at an embankment in Motomiya, Fukushima Prefecture, after contaminated crushed stone was used in concrete for the bank, the prefectural government said Thursday.

Radiation levels of up to one microsievert per hour were detected about a centimeter above ground at the Gohyakugawa embankment.

They are nowhere near the majority ( who eat any food and go anywhere without a single worry about radiation contamination), probably not even 10% of the population. But thanks to the net and particularly the social media like Twitter, the Japanese people now have a direct tool to observe how the officialdom works, firsthand.

The most recent case in point happened yesterday, over the so-called "public hearing" held by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The public hearing was about the approval of the result of the so-called stress test of one of the nuclear power plants operated by Kansai Electric Power Company (Ooi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture, in the so-called "Nuclear Ginza").

Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The European Union added 866 megawatts of offshore wind power capacity in 2011, 80 percent of it from Siemens AG, the European Wind Energy Association said today in an e- mailed press release.

A total of 235 new turbines were connected to the power grid from nine offshore wind farms, mainly in British waters, the industry group said. They came after installations totalling 883 megawatts in 2010, and bring the EU total to 3,813 megawatts of capacity spread across 53 wind farms in 10 countries, said the group.

The association wants European governments to authorise installations by 2020 totaling 40,000 megawatts of capacity, or 4 percent of electricity consumption in the 27-nation bloc.

An empty shopping street, under a sign reading "Nuclear Power - The Energy for a Better Future", is seen at the entrance of Futaba town, inside the exclusion zone of a 20km radius around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Fukushima prefecture, January 15, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer ...

(Reuters) - Japan's push to restart nuclear reactors shut for maintenance by proving their safety through stress tests and plans to let them operate for as long as 60 years have sparked an angry response from the public, wary of atomic power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.

In a rare protest, a group of citizen observers delayed for hours a hearing at the trade ministry on Wednesday, at which the nuclear watchdog presented to experts its first completed review of stress test results for two reactors from Fukui prefecture's Ohi nuclear power plant.

The watchdog, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), said in a draft report the tests showed the reactors were capable of withstanding a severe shock similar to the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima plant. But the report's review by a panel of experts is set to continue after observers demanded access to the deliberations and questioned the expert panel's impartiality.

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Much like Greece, Hungary was one of those small, slightly peripheral countries that most people in the financial markets probably thought they could get through a career without ever worrying about very much.

With a population of slightly less than 10 million, and with a total gross domestic product of less than $200 billion — only half the market value of Apple Inc. — it hardly had much of a claim on the attention of investors.

But right now, Hungary is could be the epicenter of the latest next financial storm.

The country is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Its authoritarian populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban is refusing to play ball with the International Monetary Fund. Bond yields are soaring and credit is drying up. The country may, in the next few weeks, become the first major nation of this ongoing sovereign crisis to default — and that could trigger a wave of massive, perhaps even crippling losses across the European and indeed global banking system.

Seven electric power suppliers claim in their reports to the government on the safety of their nuclear plants that key equipment and reactor cores will not sustain damage even if hit by a earthquake twice as powerful as they assume.

The seven utilities have submitted reports to the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) based on their primary evaluation of so-called stress tests they conducted on their nuclear power stations.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday that it has passed an industrial endoscope into one of the reactors that suffered meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the first attempt by the plant operator to directly check the interiors of the crippled reactors.

The outcome of the 70-minute survey into the No. 2 reactor is expected to be announced later in the day. Confirming the state of the melted fuel is likely to be difficult through the investigation, but the utility may be able to gather more information on the reactor's conditions.

A government panel has concluded that it is scientifically difficult to expand the area that is eligible for medical benefits tied to "black rain" that fell on Hiroshima following the U.S. atomic bombing, as demanded by the municipal government, it has been learned.

This is despite the fact that some court rulings have indicated that the black rain fell in a broader area than was indicated by a study on which eligibility for radiation sickness was based.

A working group for an expert panel to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has drawn up a report that states, "It is scientifically difficult to recognize an area claimed by the city of Hiroshima as where the black rain fell due to a lack of data."

NIHONMATSU, Fukushima -- At least nine of the 12 households living in an apartment building here where high radiation levels were found want to move out, it was learned from local authorities and other sources.

The high radiation levels are thought to have been caused by irradiated gravel taken from Namie, near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, that was used to make concrete used in the building. The apartment building was finished in July of last year. Of the 12 households, five are disaster evacuees from Namie and five are disaster evacuees from Minamisoma, and the other two households are local residents. The evacuees' apartments were rented by the prefectural government.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency presented a draft report Wednesday that approves the safety test results on two idled reactors at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s Oi plant in Fukui Prefecture at a meeting with experts, which was temporarily blocked due to a civilian protest over its handling of the screening of the report.

It is the first time the agency has made such an evaluation of safety test results on reactors, submitted by a number of utilities so far. The safety tests are required to resume operations of idled reactors in the wake the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

The agency will work to finalize the report by hearing what the experts have to say.

The meeting was originally scheduled to start at 4:15 p.m., but the start was delayed until around 8 p.m. due to a protest by citizens who were asked to watch the meeting on a real-time monitor set up in a separate room.

The Green Party of Canada said despite public concern over fallout from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Health Canada failed to report higher than normal radioactive iodine levels in rainwater.

The Greens have been calling for Canada to increase transparency around possible radioactive contamination in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

“We were worried that this important information would not reach the public and unfortunately, it looks as if we were right,” said Green Leader Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich Gulf Islands in a written press release.

It has now been revealed that data were not released from a Calgary Health Canada monitoring station detecting levels of radioactive iodine in rainwater well above the Canadian guideline for drinking water.

In an impassioned plea for peace, twenty-two women’s organizations in South Korea make their case for a better world by asking for the circumvention of nuclear weapons and the closing down of power reactors in the region.

(WNN) Seoul, SOUTH KOREA: We South Korean women believe nuclear weapons and power reactors are a matter of life or death. They threaten our lives, the lives of our families and all living creatures.

We Korean women remember the tragic atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 when some 700,000 people, including 70,000 Koreans, were exposed to atomic radiation. The horror of mushroom clouds, which melted people and buildings and contaminated soil, still lingers today because more than 20,000 nuclear weapons exist on our planet.

We Korean women feel an enormous sense of crisis as we witness the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011. We are shocked once again at the destructive power of radiation seen in the loss of human lives, environmental pollution and contamination of food. We are even more shocked at the foolishness of those who continued to build nuclear reactors even after the danger of nuclear power generation was demonstrated at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

HANFORD, Wash., Jan. 18 (UPI) -- The cleanup is not going well at a former Washington state nuclear site that made plutonium for the first world's atom bombs, officials said.

The plant in Hanford produced plutonium 70 years ago for the first atom bomb ever detonated at the New Mexico Trinity test site and also made plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in World War II.

Andrea Rossi, the inventor and energy behind the E-Cat was interviewed by Gary Hendershot and Sterling Allan for the Smart Scarecrow Show last Saturday the 14th of January 2012. The headline remark was Mr. Rossi has sent prototypes to the Underwriters Laboratories (UL). As best can be determined, that remark is in the past tense.

The customary view is the UL accepts products destined for sale in the final form, which is a fact. However, the UL also offers governmental units assistance in establishing reasoned law, regulation and rules. For manufacturers the UL also extends more than just final product tests, they work with manufacturers at the design stage to assure that a final product will in fact achieve an UL label. It’s a highly likely prospect that the design stage is where the UL and Mr. Rossi have started the process. A quick review of the UL policy suggests that the E-Cat is substantially interesting enough to begin the UL Process and that Low Energy Nuclear Reactions are a new field.

For the cheering section, The UL will have to have a working unit running to establish their parameters on the terms set by the UL. At some point, if an application for certification is made, the certainty the E-Cat will offer an alternative power source is essentially – a sure thing.

The UL involvement follows news that National Instruments (NI) is working with Mr. Rossi in designing new control systems for the one- megawatt and home size 10 kilowatt (kw) E-Cat. In the conversation Mr. Rossi offered that now great progress is being made and on his blog he’s indicated that they have been able to achieve stable steam production of 400ºC. This will be important later for the efficient production of electricity.